alex is a zine, just like you and me

Hello! Thanks so much for visiting AlexZine's website. Here is a short but riveting history of how Alex came to be:

First of all, Alex is made by me, A. Why did I choose to name the zine Alex? Well, I liked the idea of the zine having a person's name, rather than conceptual name. All of the conceptual names I thought up seemed to limit the focus of the zine, or speak too directly to its contents. I wanted my zine to be like a person you don't know yet, who could turn out to have any personality once you start talking. Alex, as a zine, can think or say whatever Alex wants, you know? Anyway, the reason I chose Alex in particular is because it's a gender-neutral name, and because it has four letters in it, just like mine.

My history with zine-making goes like this: I first started making zines in high school, when my new friends in my new town told me I had "lots of opinions" and therefore I should make zines. Aside from the opinion part, what I found fun about zines was creating collage art for the backgrounds, assembling the components of the zine by hand, and then trading them with penpals. I stopped making them after college, but started again recently, after volunteering at the ABC No Rio zine library. Cataloging new zine entries to the collection meant reading them, and I rediscovered what I most love about personal zines: people's quirky voices. I fell in love with reading zines, which made me want to write one. That's the beauty of zine-making: zines beget zines.

Anyway, my specific inspiration for Alex was finding a safe space to write about issues of gender identity, but I quickly moved beyond that issue (ha) and decided to expand the zine's scope to encompass anything that's on my mind, like how do you feel about your bra, and what it's like to type on a typewriter when you have a perfectly good computer. Now Alex just feels like a funky alter-ego, a handcrafted textual object whose personality is created anew with each issue.